A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  (This uprising would eventually lead to the fall of the Tang dynasty itself.) Ch’oe managed to return home to Silla in his late-twenties and took high office. He appears soon, however, to have chafed at the barriers, in both promotion possibilities and policy implementation, put up by the Silla sociopolitical hierarchy, and withdrew from the capital to take provincial posts and eventually to retire to the haven of a Buddhist temple. His works—including a famous “Ten-Point Policy Recommendation” to the final female Silla monarch, Queen Chinsng, as well as a chronicle of his observations while in the service of the Tang emperor—displayed the full range of his scholarly expertise, from Buddhism and Confucianism to poetry. Only a fraction of his voluminous writings remains today, but they were prized and rediscovered throughout the subsequent course of Korean history. Like those of Chang Pogo himself, Ch’oe Ch’iwn’s life and times offer a window into the final phase of a golden age in ancient Korea, when Silla showed both its maturity and its old age.

  SILLA AND NORTHEAST ASIA

  That Ch’oe Ch’iwn and Chang Pogo both made their reputations and gained seminal experience in China before applying these lessons back in their homeland illuminates the vibrant connections that Silla enjoyed at the crossroads (or cross-straits) of the northeast Asian region. In fact, Chang Pogo’s influence extended to Japan and likely beyond northeast Asia, and indeed there might not have been a Korean historical figure better-known outside northeast Asia until the twentieth century. Most of the sources upon which his biographical portrait has been constructed and embellished, in fact, are from China and Japan. Especially influential were the writings of the great Tang poet Du Mu, whose familiarity with Chang reflects Chang’s considerable fame and what appear to be strong connections to the Chinese elite, and the chronicles of the Japanese Buddhist monk Ennin.

  According to Ennin’s fascinating “Account of Travels in Tang for the Purpose of Seeking the Law,” the Sillans in Shandong constituted a thriving community that dominated the regional maritime trading system. Centered around the Korean Buddhist temples, the Sillans built a home away from home, carrying forth with their own ways of life and trading. Indeed Ennin witnessed a major Korean-Buddhist festival that endured for three days, another festival commemorating Silla’s victory over Kogury 150 years earlier (!), and other expressions of Silla’s collective identity. Although Ennin never recounts meeting him, Chang Pogo, not the king of Silla, is the looming authority figure to whom this community answered. So moved was Ennin by the kind treatment and protection offered to him by Chang’s surrogates in the Shandong Silla society that the monk wrote the great man a letter of gratitude. To Ennin, Chang was clearly the mastermind and dominant figure behind this intricately and efficiently designed network of merchants, monks, and others who plied back and forth from the Korean peninsula to the eastern coast of China.

  From this base of operations Chang’s agents in turn connected to a vast trading network that stretched all the way to eastern Africa and the Arabian peninsula, merchants from which, it appears, also visited Silla. The items that flowed through these passages in northeast Asia originally reflected the official commerce in tribute goods such as ginseng and silk, but by the time Chang achieved his dominant position based in Ch’nghae Fortress, trade items also included animal products such as horns, falcons, and sealskins, and particularly ceramic goods. In fact, Chang appears to have facilitated significantly the process of not only circulating Chinese ceramics, among the best in the world, but also of applying Chinese ceramics technologies to further develop a native Korean ceramics industry on the southern coast of the peninsula. The prime locations connected with Korean ceramics, including Kangjin and Namhae Island, are usually associated with the subsequent Kory era, but this development might have begun in Chang’s time. Excavations of both ceramic factories and shipwrecks from the era have added to this impression that Korea’s maritime power once served as a stimulus for economic activity in the country. Such a connection between Korea’s seafaring potential and internal development has reached another peak over the past thirty years in South Korea, with its export-oriented industrial growth and the preeminent position of Korean companies in the global shipbuilding industry.

  Indeed Chang Pogo’s commanding influence over trade in northeast Asia tells us much about Silla’s relationship to the region as a whole, and it stimulates further thinking about the standing of Silla in the longer trajectory of Korean history. In one sense, Chang Pogo’s activities suggest that this period represented a peak in Korea’s capacity to take advantage of its geography at the center of northeast Asia instead of being victimized by these circumstances, as it did repeatedly both before and after Chang. Furthermore, Chang’s story shows that, in this particular era of Korean history at least, trade and commerce could indeed play a dominant role in the country’s economy, enough to allow one particular merchant to use his wealth and power to play political mediator and, indeed, even kingmaker. Both tendencies—Korea’s commercial prominence in northeast Asia and the force of economic activity in the realms of politics, society, and culture—are being pursued by Korean leaders in the early twenty-first century. Since the 1990s a steady stream of Chang-related developments has rekindled interest in, and furthered the mythologizing of, Chang Pogo: the establishment of tourist-oriented memorials and museums in Shandong, site of the temple complex that Chang established; and pop culture products in Korea such as the “God of the Seas” hit television series. These developments, however, also have the potential of contributing further to expansive visions of Korean identity and standing in the context of globalization and regional integration. Chang serves, then, as an embodiment of the dreams of Korean prominence in the region through regional integration. If it could be done before, so the thinking goes, it can be done again, with Koreans in the lead.

  The reconsideration of Korea’s regional position via a creative appropriation of Chang Pogo and his era also accompanies, ironically, a recent downgrading of Unified Silla in Korea’s historical trajectory. A growing perspective in both popular and academic arenas has come to view “Unified Silla” as somewhat of a misnomer, given that Silla’s vanquishing of Paekche and Kogury in the seventh century left unincorporated the vast majority of

  former Kogury territory. This territory was claimed by a thriving kingdom, Parhae, that stretched from the northern part of the peninsula well into Manchuria. Parhae’s status in conventional Korean historiography has always been somewhat ambiguous, as only its ruling elite seem to have descended from Kogury origins, while the masses came from a mish-mash of various ethnicities. More powerful in excluding Parhae were official histories compiled in subsequent periods instituting the notion of a “Three Kingdoms” era of ancient Korea that came to an end through Silla’s unification. Partly due to nationalist sentiment over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, the concept of a “Unified Silla” era has lost ground to a perception of this era as that of the “First North-South Division,” with the strong implication that Parhae was a fully Korean historical entity. (In North Korea, for obvious reasons, this view is a matter of course.) Chang Pogo, then, is not the only artifact of the late first millennium to be mined for contemporary purposes; Parhae is grounds for claiming that Korea at this time was a central player in northeast Asia in more ways than one. However transparent the motives behind this revisionism, these issues draw beneficial attention to the significance of these long-ago eras even beyond their contemporary connections.

  LOCAL STRONGMEN AND THE END OF SILLA

  For all his utility as a symbol of Unified Silla’s growth and achievements, in the end Chang tells us just as much about its demise. We have reason and documentation, in particular the remarkable fragments of village household registers discovered in the early twentieth century, to believe that the Unified Silla state had made great strides in extending central control—or at least taxation authority—following its conquest of Kogury and Paekche. But there appear to have been l
imits to this integration effort. Indeed Chang’s great power might have reflected not the Silla state’s authority but rather its weakness in the outer provinces. And the court’s decision to turn to Chang to command the southwest might have reflected the state’s lack of control and revenue outside the original Silla territory of the southeastern part of the peninsula. Within half a century after Chang’s death, the very region that had served as his base (and was likely his original home region)—the southwestern part of the country that used to belong to the kingdom of Paekche—would erupt in rebellion against the Silla state. This uprising was led by a local warlord, Kyn Hwn, who, while fanning the flames of Paekche resentment and calling his breakaway region “Paekche,” likely envisioned himself a successor to Chang Pogo. Another local strongman, however, would prove even more effective in overturning Silla control, and he called his territory “Kogury.”

  4

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  Founding of the Kory Dynasty

  CHRONOLOGY

  Late 9th c. Beginning of the Latter Three Kingdoms period

  895 Wang Kn joins Kim Kungye’s rebel movement against Silla

  918 Founding of the Kory by Wang Kn

  935 Silla’s surrender to Wang Kn, solidification of Kory Rule

  936 Final defeat of Latter Paekche by Wang Kn

  943 Drafting of Wang’s Ten Injunctions

  958 Institution of the state examination system

  THE ISSUANCE OF WANG KN’S “TEN INJUNCTIONS,” 943

  The founding of the Kory dynasty constitutes a seminal event in Korean history in many ways. It pacified the peninsula after decades of civil war during what is commonly called the “Latter Three Kingdoms” period (late ninth–early tenth centuries), extended the territory of the country further northward by incorporating the southern edge of the Parhae kingdom, integrated the ruling groups of both the Parhae and Silla into a new aristocratic element that might have lasted into the twentieth century, and expressed a clear sense of national identity based on native religious and cultural elements. The apex figure in this process was Wang Kn, the founder of the Kory dynasty, and the event that binds him to these significant trends is his issuance, just before his death, of the “Ten Injunctions” to his royal successors.

  The Ten Injunctions has come down as one of the most influential documents in Korean history and a testament to the forces that shaped Kory into an enduring political entity. This series of directives accentuated

  the significance of Korea’s distinctive cultural identity, emphasized the centrality of both Buddhism and geomancy as well as Confucian statecraft, warned of the “barbarians” to the north, and institutionalized, some say, discrimination against the southwestern region of the peninsula. This last feature, specified in the eighth injunction, has aroused considerable interest lately because of its ostensible sanctioning of the bane of South Korean politics since democratization in 1987—namely, regionalism. Many scholars claim, in fact, that Injunction #8 proves that the Ten Injunctions were a forgery, that circumstantial evidence renders it highly unlikely if not impossible that Wang Kn himself actually issued such orders. The skepticism is well founded, but it does not deny the impact of this document in Kory and Korean history. Indeed, that the Ten Injunctions remains an object of contention continues the long history of its service as a helpful lens into the significance of the Kory founding on Korea’s identity and culture.

  “GREAT FOUNDER OF KOREA”

  Wang himself was born and came of age as the idea of a single country began to fall apart in the final two decades of the tenth century. As noted in Chapter 3, the Silla kingdom experienced difficulties keeping the outlying parts of the peninsula under institutional control, and the local strongmen who arose in the peripheries, such as Chang Pogo, served as potentially dangerous challengers to Silla rule. Indeed the first major rebel leader, Kyn Hwn, was a high Silla military official assigned to the same southwestern coastal zone that had served as Chang’s power base. Kyn Hwn fanned the flames of anti-Silla resentment and remnant Paekche loyalties to amass a territory that he called “Latter Paekche,” which proved formidable enough at one time to ransack the Silla capital and install his own preferred monarch. His primary challenger, however, came not from the Silla court but rather from another rebel leader based in the central part of the peninsula, Kim Kungye, who referred to himself as the successor to the Kogury monarchs. Like Kyn Hwn, Kungye had belonged to the upper tiers of Silla society—he was a prince, in fact. When he was cast off from his family (likely because he was an illegitimate son), he retreated to the countryside as a Buddhist monk. Before long, however, he joined the growing anti-Silla movement among local strongmen and displayed great skills in capturing territory in the peninsula’s heartland. Kungye’s battles against Kyn Hwn over peninsular supremacy at the turn of the tenth century rendered imminent the death of Silla, but this duel was not decided until Kungye was toppled, not by Kyn Hwn, but rather by one of his own lieutenants.

  The person who took Kungye’s place was Wang Kn, who had for some time been Kungye’s most successful general in the struggles against other regional lords. Wang had entered Kungye’s orbit in 895 when Wang’s father, the court-sanctioned local leader in the west-central coastal city of Songak—today known as Kaesng—joined the monk’s new kingdom, which by the year 911 had conquered a vast territory. When Kungye began to grow cruel and show disturbing signs of uncontrolled despotism, Kungye’s top officers overthrew him and handed the crown to Wang Kn. In the official historical accounts from the Kory dynasty, Wang is depicted as having displayed great reluctance to betray his loyalty to his superior, Kungye, but it is likely that Wang himself led the effort to take control. Kungye perished while being chased from the throne, and immediately Wang set his sights on overcoming the resistance of both Silla and Latter Paekche. His longtime nemesis, Kyn Hwn, who had meanwhile been overthrown himself by his own son, actually joined Wang’s cause to defeat his former country. By 935, Wang had gained the peaceful submission of Silla’s last monarch. Upon putting down the final bout of Paekche resistance in 936, Wang, known historically through his reign name of “T’aejo,” or “Great Founder,” accomplished the successful reunification of the country.

  Given his own beginnings as the scion of a powerful merchant family in a far-off province of Silla, Wang knew well the potential pitfalls presented by regional power holders. Hence his most daunting task in fortifying his rule was gaining the subjugation, or at least the consent, of the many local chiefs scattered around the peninsula. This issue would remain at the forefront of challenges faced by the Kory monarchy for the rest of the five-century-long dynasty. Eventually the Kory instituted a kind of cooperative

  “hostage” system, much like the one used later in Shogunal Japan, that required local chiefs to reside for stretches of time in the capital. For the moment, however, Wang Kn did what many rulers around the world in similar circumstances have done: use marriage alliances to consolidate political rule. Wang in fact went a step further; he himself did the marrying, and to the daughters of an astounding twenty eight different local rulers! Not all of the many sons produced from these alliances went on to become king or even play important political roles, but this step proved instrumental in securing a large pool of loyal descendants with a stake in maintaining the dynasty. To them, and more specifically to his eldest sons—three of whom would take turns in serving as the succeeding monarchs—Wang would leave behind a very specific blueprint for ruling the Kory dynasty and a personal vision for what made Kory Korea.

  CONTENT OF THE TEN INJUNCTIONS

  The country that Wang Kn envisioned reflected the many different strands of thought and religion, originating internally and externally, that had come to shape civilization on the peninsula. More impressive than the specific policy recommendations, which were significant in themselves, were the Ten Injunctions’ expansive proclamations of the central currents of culture that defined Korea’s past, present, and future. One specific
civilizational strain, however, stood out as primary: “The success of every great undertaking in our country depends upon the blessings and protection of the Buddha,” begins the first of the Ten Injunctions. Indeed, the significance of regulating well the Buddhist establishment, of building temples and other places of worship, and of sponsoring the major Buddhist festivals is emphasized in three separate injunctions. Little wonder, then, that the centrality of Buddhism to Korean civilization would reach unprecedented heights during the Kory dynasty, reflecting the maturity, diversity, and even the decadence of Buddhism’s near-millennium of dominance, especially in concert with political power. One could argue, in fact, that the state’s patronage of Buddhism in the Kory produced the peak of Korean civilization itself, given the extraordinary cultural advances that arose from this relationship.

  Like Buddhism, Confucianism had entered the peninsula from China in the Three Kingdoms era. By Wang Kn’s time, Confucian thought had pervaded the vocabulary of statecraft on the peninsula, and a critical mass of interested scholars and officials had emerged. Wang Kn himself appears in the Ten Injunctions as holding a keen awareness of the importance of Confucian precepts, and four of the injunctions allude to Confucian teachings in prescribing lessons for royal succession and the management of state affairs, including the acceptance of admonishment by the ruler. The numerous allusions to passages in the Confucian classics, in fact, might lead one to take Wang for a Confucian scholar himself.